Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

The Real Crisis in American Politics in the Ominous Age of Trump

The Major Ongoing Crisis in American Politics (and Society) and Why Virtually No One Really Wants To Honestly Acknowledge And/Or Seriously Deal With It

by Kofi Natambu

February 13, 2018

The Panopticon Review

The conventional historical narratives governing the "nature and meaning” of modern American politics (i.e. since 1945) are often brazenly distorted and stubbornly ill-informed analyses that far too often over emphasizes how the two major national political parties (and the various intensely ambitious and obsessively media focused individual “candidates and leaders” of these institutions) shape and influence our system of government and thereby impact the pervasive social, economic, and cultural fallout stemming from their involvement and participation in the normative rituals of this system. What is blatantly missing from the larger discourse however is a much broader and far more detailed and critical assessment and interpretation of how fundamentally existential factors and dynamics of U.S. history and social reality go far beyond those of self serving media personalities and careerist politicians within the structural and institutionally based bureaucratic parameters of mainstream political activity. What needs to be critically identified and examined instead is how the larger society and culture itself—its values, motives, ideas, desires, fears, anxieties, perceptions, behavior, and perspectives not only ‘influence' but in many cases actually determine how and why major decisions are made regarding what happens to the general polity via the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government.

Nowhere is this major influence and determined intervention of large demographic groups of American citizens in the affairs of government and the political economy generally felt more intensely or pervasively than in the ideological and political minefields (boobytraps?) of “race and gender” (or more accurately the omnipresent roles that the varying doctrines and practices of white and male supremacy—as well as state sanctioned xenophobia— plays in American society and culture generally at the levels of both material reality and ideological/social activity). The empirical evidence of these factors and their actual role can be found most tellingly and dramatically in the historical voting patterns of white American citizens of every demographic class group in U.S. national and statewide elections over the past seven decades. What is revealed time and again is just how consistently and incessantly these voting patterns have determined not merely the perennial outcomes of these elections but how they have in turn shaped the very form and content of the national discourse on what American politics "is and should be” with respect to the social and economic policy investment issues of labor, education, housing, energy, environmental protections, criminal justice, reproductive rights, and fiscal/budgetary management. Furthermore the ways in which these voting patterns reveal how American citizens generally perceive and thus participate in its rituals on the basis of seeking and demanding social, political, and economic status that openly advantages their relative position(s) in the structural and institutional hierarchies that systemically rules and dominates via specific demographic segments of our national population over that of “others" they deem are “not worthy” of social, political, and economic parity and equality in the society as a whole (e.g. oppressed national minorities as defined by the coercive and ideologically imposed white supremacist category of “inferior races”, and the sexist, misogynist and patriarchal domination and control of women generally).

For example it is painfully clear given the overwhelmingly well documented empirical evidence that generally speaking white American voters in particular are not by any stretch of the imagination either progressive or liberal and are certainly not even remotely leftwing in their fundamental political positions, values, beliefs, and attitudes. In fact since 1945 the United States has been quite distinctive and even unique among so-called advanced and highly developed Western nations in that such a large major swath of their national population of voters are so consistently conservative to openly rightwing politically and their voting records at both the federal and state levels as well as locally reflect this blatant fact (by contrast European nations like England, France, Germany, and Italy not to mention politically progressive and social democratic scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have a far wider range of ideological and political positions and representatives than are customary in the United States. Thus it is no mystery why in the past half century since 1968 the Republican Party has dominated national politics (most ominously revealing stat: As of this very moment in 2018 Republicans have now been the occupants of the White House a commanding 60% of the time (30 out of the past 50 years or 8 out of 13 elections) and if not for the national black vote of over 90% on behalf of the Democratic Party in the specific elections of 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008 and 2012 the Republicans would have won every single national presidential election in the past 50 years!

In that light no one needs to ask how we all got here in the deadly Orwellian dystopian dungeon known as the 'Age of Trump.'

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trump and the duty we have to connect the dots

Ta-Nehisi Coates is pictured in this YouTube video speaking to the the
2017 Zengerle Family Lecture in the Arts and Humanities at the U.S.
Military Academy.

In the 2016 election, which age ranges of white supporters did Trump win? Which economic brackets? And which gender? If you answered all, all and both, you are correct. If you did not, what does your mistake say about the ability of journalism to paint an accurate picture of reality?

One of the most sweeping and thoughtful critiques of the media comes in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ just-released book, "We Were Eight Years in Power." Coates argues that journalists missed an essential truth when we diminish Trump’s support among whites.

“Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31),” writes Coates. “He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won young whites, ages 18–29 (+4), adult whites, age 30 to 44 (+17), middle-age whites, age 45 to 64 (+28), and senior whites, age 65 and older (+19).” Trump also won among every economic bracket of whites, writes Coates, drawing on findings from Edison Research.

Coates argues that after the recent election, journalists lessened the consequences of whiteness and by extension, white supremacy. The reason why journalists discount the enormity of Trump’s support among whites is because to do otherwise would call into question the American self-image of goodness. This is a similar argument to the one Coates made in his writings about the shootings of unarmed black men: Many white Americans need black victims to be guilty because it protects an image of a fair America.

This misperception grips even thoughtful, enlightened writers like Nicholas Kristof and George Packer, Coates writes, and he suggests that the mainstream news media suffers from widespread delusion about whiteness. Can a democratic nation’s free press operate under a mass delusion about race?

Ida B. Wells

To answer this question, let’s travel back in time to the pinnacle of post-Civil War white supremacy: 1892. That's the year that lynching of African-Americans peaked in the United States. On March 10, 1892, the New York Times reported that three African-American men were “literally shot to pieces” by a white mob. One of the lynched men, Thomas Moss, was a friend of Ida B. Wells, a woman who was born the daughter of slaves and who became a journalist and anti-lynching crusader.

Moss and his associates, said the New York Times, were lynched because they had shot three white “Deputy Sheriffs.” In fact, as Wells quickly learned, a white mob surrounded a black-owned business and fired into it. The three African Americans defended themselves against the mob, firing back and injuring three men, none of whom were “Deputy Sheriffs.”

“This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was,” wrote Wells in her autobiography. “An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’” This led Wells to embark on one of the most courageous journalistic crusades in American history. Journeying across the South, Wells investigated lynching cases and discovered a disconnect between the perception of blacks as lawless and thus deserving of mob action, and the reality that many black victims were clearly innocent.

Wells was not only uncovering facts; she was operating against the deep-seated racism embedded in the reporting of the day. In an article in 1894, the New York Times referred to white lynch mobs as “savages,” but in the same paragraph stated that “The crime for which negroes have frequently been lynched, and occasionally been put to death with frightful tortures, is a crime to which negroes are particularly prone.” The crime the Times was alluding to was rape. The mainstream press believed that black men were lynched because they were raping white women.

In fact, through her investigations, Wells uncovered four truths about the “black rapist” trope. First, rape was not the stated cause in most lynching cases. Second, when rape was charged, it was generally done so after the lynching took place as an ex post facto justification. Third, in most cases where a sexual relationship was in fact real, it was generally between consenting adults. And fourth, the root cause of lynching could often be traced to economic competition.

For her efforts, Wells was met with incredulity and anger. In 1894, the Times said that Wells was a “slanderous and nasty minded mulattress, who does not scruple to represent the victims of black brutes in the South as willing victims.” Despite all her courageous reporting, Wells could not break through a national narrative that protected a vision of white benevolence.

Even the great and otherwise enlightened Frederick Douglass told Wells that until he read her evidence to the contrary, he too was troubled by “lasciviousness on the part of Negroes,” Wells recalled in her autobiography. While Douglass and other African-Americans learned from Wells’ exhaustive reporting, white America clung to the myths. Twenty years after Wells finished her investigations, the blockbuster "Birth of a Nation" told a story a heroic Ku Klux Klan defending the innocence of white maidens against lascivious black brutes.

We live in different eras, and 2017 is not 1892. But parallels exist.

If Coates is right, Trump’s advocacy of white privilege and his erasure of Obama are the central features of his presidency. Imagine for a second that Trump’s perceived advocacy of white rights is not considered by his supporters to be a bug, but a feature.

That would explain why his outrageousness never seems to hurt his base. If many among his wide, white base voted for a racial realignment, then the wackier Trump is, the more muscular a white supremacist he could be.

A recent article in BuzzFeed reveals the extent that the so-called Alt-White radicals, in coordination with members of Trump’s team, promoted a white supremacist agenda. Coates believes that we have failed to grasp the brutal consequences of broad white support of President Trump.

“Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist,” Coates writes. “But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”

When a writer as careful and probing as Coates tells us that we might be suffering from a widespread delusion, we should pay attention to the charge and understand that historical precedent suggests it is possible, that journalism as a whole can suffer from a widespread insensitivity to racial issues.

What should journalists do today? First, unlike the mainstream journalists of the 1890s — who rejected charges of bias — we should use the charges of Coates and others to goad ourselves to examine our perspectives.

When the media of a majority culture sees the world, it often perceives it as race-neutral, the “color of water,” to borrow a phrase, used in a different context, in James McBride’s best-selling memoir. But today’s journalists, with less overt racism and far more access to different perspectives, need to face the issue of race forthrightly.

The second thing today’s journalists should do is to connect the dots. The 1890s saw a relentless string of lynchings, and the era’s press was better at listing the horrors than finding the golden threads.

Journalism has often been a better strobe light than a searchlight. But when we list Trump’s endless tweets, proclamations and imbroglios, we could do a better job of seeing them as pieces of a whole.

When Trump maligns an American judge of Mexican heritage; defends neo-Nazis; attacks two Gold Star families, one Muslim and one black; or views Puerto Rico’s population as being too lazy to help themselves after a hurricane, we must avoid seeing these as distinct incidents.

Connecting the dots of white supremacy would challenge journalistic objectivity and require a level of self-awareness that is difficult to achieve, but reporters, above all else, are charged with creating a true picture of the world. And we must not avoid grappling with all the racial issues that hide in plain sight.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Mindich is the chair of the journalism department at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University; before that, he was a journalism professor at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, where he served nearly a decade as chair. The author of two books and numerous articles.

Malcolm X (1925-1965)

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)

"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."

Nina Simone (1933-2003)

"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."

Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)

"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .

Angela Davis (b. 1944)

"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)

"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857

Cecil Taylor (b. 1929)

“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”

Ella Baker (1903-1986)

"Strong people don't need strong leaders"

Paul Robeson (1898-1976)

"The artist must take sides, He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery, I had no alternative"

John Coltrane (1926-1967)

"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."

Miles Davis (1926-1991)

"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."

C.L.R. James (1901-1989)

"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."

Edward Said (1935-2003)

“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not﻿ waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."

Editor's Bio

Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.